ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the distinction between globe and sphere, as alternative topologies of environmental awareness, crosscuts the conventional dichotomy, as it appears in contemporary environmentalist debates, between ecocentrism and anthropocentrism. It suggests that the notion of the global environment, far from marking humanity’s reintegration into the world, signals the culmination of a process of separation. To obtain a comprehensive knowledge of the environment, one must already have in mind an image of the globe, or come pre-equipped with what Kant called ‘an extended concept of the whole surface of the earth’, onto which may be mapped the data of experience. The appearances are commonly pictured in terms of the addition of extra layers of being to that basic layer represented by the earth’s surface. Hence the tripartite division into lithosphere, biosphere and noosphere, corresponding respectively to the inorganic substance of rocks and minerals, the organic substance of living things and the superorganic substance of human culture and society.
